SOURCE: "Mead and Skinner: Agency and Determinism," in Behaviorism: A Forum for Critical Discussion, Vol. 16, No. 2, Fall, 1988, pp. 109-62.

In the following essay, Baldwin compares Mead's ideas on agency and determinism to B. F. Skinner's, and finds considerable similarities in their scientific reasoning.

With some behaviorists heeding the "call to cognition" (Deitz & Arrington, 1984; Morris, 1985), behaviorists are raising increasing numbers of questions about the role of thought, deliberate action, agency and determinism in behavioral theories. Most methodological behaviorists and radical behaviorists equate agency with free will, which they reject (Zuriff, 1985), or with inner causes that can be explained with behavior principles (Zuriff, 1975, 1979, 1985). In contrast, social learning theorists and cognitive behaviorists emphasize the importance of cognitive processes in the construction of deliberate action, and criticize the more traditional behaviorists for assuming that self-determined behavior can be completely predicted from genetic and environmental data (Bandura, 1986; Pierce & Epling, 1984;).

Is this polarization within...